The Scarlet Fig: Or, Slowly Through a Land of Stone, Book Three of the Vergil Magus Series

Appendix V The Encyclopaedia of the World of Vergil Magus

The fictitious tales of Vergil Magus were but one part of a vast project that occupied the later part of Avram Davidson’s (1923–1993) life. The fictions were written to engage the reader, but it was the factual and mythic realm, and quasi-historic lore of Vergil Magus that much engaged Avram himself.

His numerous reference books, Pliny the Elder and the like, were extensively hand-annotated with notes and comments for the Vergil project. He had devised a sort of Vergil Magus Encyclopaedia, with a flexible system of page numbering called “Dean Numbers” (named after the late Dean Dickensheet), so that new material could be easily inserted. And he prepared the file boxes of handwritten notecards to keep track of all this data.

Avram wrote (in The Best of Avram Davidson Doubleday, 1979): “As of the date I write this (July 19, 1977) I have at hand twenty-five large notebooks and over five thousand file cards. The ensuing year of my life is to be mainly devoted to reworking it all, and so producing The Encyclopedia of the World of Vergil Magus.”

Was all of this information gathering and cross-referencing a distraction from the novels and tales themselves? Certainly he did not live to complete The Encyclopaedia (his usual preferred spelling), or the proposed 9-volume trinity of Vergil Magus trilogies. If Avram in his later years had spent the countless man-hours of labour on the Vergil Magus fictions, rather than the encyclopedic world building, he might have achieved some of the prosperity that eluded him. But who can say how an author’s mind should work? Especially an author with such a rich and complex mind as Avram Davidson.

I hope one day, a well-endowed university library will acquire The Avram Davidson Archive, and teams of enthusiastic students will catalog this mountain of raw material, and put together the jigsaw puzzles of Avram Davidson’s last great work.

In the meantime, here is a selection of the Vergil Magus Notecards, from A-Y (there are no cards for letters K, X, or Z), focusing on references to The Scarlet Fig. There are 6 shoebox-size file boxes, each containing hundreds and hundreds of these cards, far too many for me to count. I can envision them illustrated and published as an arcane Tarot-like deck.

I will leave it to future scholars to define their precise meaning. For now I present them to readers as a tantalizing glimpse, to puzzle and wonder at how a great writer’s mind works.